Western plot

Moscow, June 23: President Vladimir Putin has raised the prospect of a return to Soviet-style academic censorship after he accused the West of plotting to distort Russian history in an attempt to crush patriotic sentiment in schools.

The Russian leader claimed that a generation of schoolchildren were learning a version of their past that had been deliberately skewed by historians in the pay of the West.

“Many of our textbooks are written by people on foreign grants,” Putin told history and science teachers at a conference outside Moscow.

“They are dancing a polka ordered by those who pay for it. This is undoubtedly an instrument for influencing our country.”

In a warning that will send a chill through Russia’s dwindling ranks of liberal academics, the President indicated that publishing houses that did not print more patriotic textbooks would face state censorship.

“Publishing houses should become more responsible,” he said. “The state should play a greater role in this respect.” According to the President, western historians have attempted to belittle the Soviet Union’s role in World War II and exaggerate the negative aspects of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, which saw millions of Russians die.

He said Russia’s past was much more benign and much less blood-soaked than that of the US. “We have fewer such (dark) pages than do some countries, and they were less terrible than in some countries,” he said. “We have never used nuclear weapons against civilians and we have never dumped chemical weapons on thousands of kilometres of land as was the case in Vietnam.”

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a historian and one of the last independent MPs in the Russian parliament, said that Kremlin hardliners were keen to revive Stalin’s reputation in order to justify the country’s increasingly autocratic path.

Mayor term

Putin asked the Russian capital’s legislative body yesterday to keep Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov in office after his term runs out in December, the Kremlin press service said. Luzhkov, 70, has been Moscow’s mayor for 15 years and is a strong Putin ally.